In order to enable communication between various devices in substation automation or distribution automation systems there has evolved a standard that enables communication between various devices of various device suppliers. This standard is IEC 61850. According to this standard software elements of equipment are hierarchically organized in a number of levels including a logical device level, a logical node level, a data object level and a data attribute level. A logical device here normally corresponds to a device in such a system, while a logical node corresponds to a function of the device, which data objects and data attributes relate to data of such a function. There may here be several logical nodes in a logical device for a number of various functions.
One type of device used in such systems is the intelligent electronic device (IED), which is used for monitoring and/or controlling pieces of local process equipment in such systems, for instance equipment like circuit breakers and transformers. In order to perform this monitoring and control there are provided I/O (input/output) connections on the IED leading to such pieces of equipment. These pieces of local process equipment are process interface devices, because they are the interfaces to an electrical process being controlled by the substation automation or distribution automation system. The electrical process may be an electrical power generation, transmission or supply process. Such an IED does thus communicate directly with these process interface devices using direct point-to-point connections or a local communication network.
IEDs and devices on higher levels do use the IEC 61850 communication standard for communicating with each other. Examples of this are devices in the protection and control product series IED670 being sold by ABB.
However the process interface devices do normally today not have the capability to communicate with other devices at higher levels in the system than the IED they are connected to.
It would therefore be of interest if these devices were able to communicate with other devices on higher control and protection levels, which would enable the provision of for instance a more flexible control and protection structure.
CN101035099 describes a general gateway design method for conversion of the 103 protocol to the IEC 61850 standard.
WO 2005/055538 describes a process interface device that may be a temperature sensor, which communicates with a medium converter using a serial RS 232-interface. The medium converter is a serial/Ethernet-converter which converts data from the device into a first format x. A data message with the first format x is then transferred to a gateway on a data bus, which in turn converts it to a data message according to a second format, which is the IEC 61850 format. Thereafter the IEC 61850 message is transferred to an IEC 61850 device.
It would therefore be of interest to provide an improved process interface device in a substation automation or distribution automation system that allows communication with devices on several higher levels.